At the other end of the rope was his older brother.
It was an early morning on the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi. The evening before, Jiuyang Zhu had brought the family’s flock home and counted the sheep again and again. Two were missing. His mother was upset. At first light the next day, the two brothers climbed the hills with a rope, calling into the vast, furrowed wilderness, then holding their breath to listen.
From far away came the faint cry of a sheep, so weak it seemed the wind might carry it away.
They followed the sound until they reached the edge of a cliff. Zhu’s brother tied one end of the rope around him and slowly lowered him down the rock face. Zhu reached for the lamb, trapped halfway down the slope and trembling with fear. He caught it, held it close, and was pulled back up, inch by inch, into the light.
He was about ten years old. He could not have known that this scene—a voice, a search, a rope lowering someone into danger and drawing him back again—would one day become a metaphor for his whole life. Nor could he have known that, many years later, he would use this childhood memory to explain how a boy who once tended sheep became a man called to shepherd people.
His name is Jiuyang Zhu. Even in Chinese, the sound of his name carries an echo of the word for sheep.
Looking back, Zhu describes that rope as a picture of calling, searching, and love. The lamb on the cliff helped him later recognize in Scripture a love that searches from above. Salvation, he came to see, is not the story of human beings climbing upward by their own strength. It is the story of one who is willing to descend for the lost.
This may be the best way to understand Jiuyang Zhu. His story is not a straight line of spiritual success. It is not a simple narrative in which an artist becomes a Christian and his work suddenly moves from darkness to light. It is a long road from the Loess Plateau to Beijing, from canvas to church, from individual anguish to public grief, and now into the complex realities of Chinese churches in North America. Along that road, one image returns again and again: the sheep.
As a young artist, Zhu painted The Lost Lamb. At the time, he had not yet read the Bible and did not understand Christianity. Yet he painted a sheep in the barren hills. Only later did he begin to see that the painting was more than a memory of rural life. It was also a kind of foreshadowing of his own life. Two decades later, he painted The Shepherd. Between the lost lamb and the shepherd lay not only the passage of time, but the rebuilding of his life, faith, art, and calling.
A Compressed Modern Life
Zhu grew up in a world without electric lights. In the cave dwellings of northern Shaanxi, the family used oil lamps at night. Land, livestock, mountain paths, seasons, and the body formed the basic order of childhood.
Then modernization arrived—and it arrived with almost violent speed.
Zhu was born in Wuqi County, Shaanxi, in 1969. He graduated from the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. In 2001, he moved to Beijing’s Songzhuang, where he lived and worked as a professional artist. These biographical facts may look simple on paper, but behind each place name lies a different historical world: the premodern life of the Loess Plateau, the artistic and intellectual ferment of Chinese modernism in the 1990s, and the contemporary art scene of Songzhuang.
He has described his childhood world as “typically premodern.” Yet within a few decades, he was swept into urbanization, industrialization, modernist thought, and postmodern consumer culture. Premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity were pressed into a single lifetime.
“So, my personality was deeply divided,” he says.
On one hand, he was a person formed by land and tradition. On the other, he was drawn to modern ideas of freedom, liberation, and self-expression. This division did not remain abstract. It entered his body and his paintings.
Zhu divides his artistic journey into three stages. The first, from the 1990s to around 2002, he describes as a period of “the loss of the soul.” During those years, his health was poor. He suffered from long-term insomnia, stomach problems, and physical weakness. He remembers that season as marked by the fear of death, deep despair, and the terrible tension between idealism and reality.
He often went alone into the mountains to sketch and think, sometimes walking for more than ten days at a time. The people he met in the mountains, their silence, and their closeness to the natural world led him to keep asking: What is creation?
The answer he eventually reached was that creation is really discovery. It is the discovery of what is small, fragile, and universally human. If one had to name it, he says, perhaps it would be love—because only love can connect human beings.
But at that time, he could not hold on to love.
He painted Ward Ghost, Garbage Dump, The Weeping Person, Paradise Lost, and The Lost Lamb. These works read almost like a medical record of the spirit. They record the condition of a modern Chinese person torn open, pursued, and overshadowed by death. Human figures drift like ghosts through the world—lonely, powerless, and unable to find a way out.
This was not merely a personal low point. It reflected a wider spiritual fracture experienced by many Chinese intellectuals, artists, and young people shaped by rapid urbanization. The old world could no longer hold him, but the new freedom had not saved him.
Meeting God at the End of Himself
To understand Zhu’s conversion, one first has to understand what kind of “Christian” he had been.
As an art student in the 1990s, he was deeply influenced by artists and thinkers who saw Christianity as an unavoidable part of China’s cultural future. He identified with Christianity, questioned it, and drew from it as a resource for thought and artistic creation. In the language of that era, he could have been called a “cultural Christian.”
From the perspective of art, suffering, redemption, and ultimate concern, Zhu believed Christianity mattered deeply for China’s future cultural imagination.
But this remained a cultural identification.
“I could identify with the culture,” he recalls, “but I could not believe there was a God.”
This was the path many Chinese intellectuals had walked: Christianity could be a civilizational resource, an aesthetic language, a moral imagination, or a tool of critique, but not necessarily a living God to whom one prays, surrenders, and belongs.
Around 2004, Zhu was working in Beijing as a professional artist. His creative life had entered a void, and so had his inner life. His health was poor enough that he would wake in the middle of the night, look at his wife and children beside him, and think, “What will happen to them if I die?”
By then, his wife had become a Christian, and other believers had come to share the gospel and pray for him. Zhu had encountered the gospel, but he still could not cross the threshold of belief.
The turning point came unexpectedly. A close friend from many years before came to Beijing and told Zhu about a frightening spiritual experience he had recently had. The details shook Zhu deeply. For him, the spiritual world was not an abstract category. Having grown up within the world of Chinese folk belief, he did not believe in God, but he did believe that spirits were real.
That day, one thought entered his mind: If there are ghosts, then there is God.
In a Western rationalist frame, such a sentence may sound abrupt. But within Zhu’s own life, it was direct and true. For a man who had long stood among folk religion, modernism, bodily illness, artistic despair, and cultural Christianity, God did not first appear as a doctrine to be mastered. God appeared when Zhu saw the limits of his own life, felt death coming near, and reached the end of himself.
That night, he went home and prayed with his wife.
“God, if you really exist, please shine your light on me.”
Once he began to pray, he could not stop. It was as though a light had pierced through him. He wept uncontrollably. He asked God why he had suffered so many years of physical weakness and pain. A sentence came into his heart: “I want you to know me more deeply.”
Looking back, Zhu says suffering did not push him away from God. Instead, it became a way of receiving grace.The next morning, he felt as if something that had pressed down on him for years had left.
“I felt light,” he says.
Not long afterward, several visiting elders laid hands on him and prayed. The warmth and comfort he experienced in that prayer moved him to tears. Later, when another visitor spoke about God’s purposes for Chinese artists and intellectuals, Zhu sat in the back of the room and wept again. When he returned home, he told his wife, “I feel as if God is calling us.”
From that point on, he was no longer merely a cultural Christian—someone who treated Christianity as an artistic or intellectual resource. He had become someone whose life had been grasped by God.
From Lost Lamb to Shepherd
After his conversion, Zhu’s life did not simply move from art into church, as if he had left one world for another. Rather, art and pastoral ministry began to flow into one another.
In Songzhuang, Zhu and his wife began hosting a Bible study. It started in their home, and many of those who came were artists or cultural workers. Over time, the small group gradually became a church. Zhu felt he was not well equipped, but he began serving among people who, like him, were searching, wounded, and full of questions. This pastoral ministry continued for about ten years.
During those years, he also created many important works, including Alas! The Sea, The Altar, Foot Washing, and The Shepherd. If his early paintings were marked by darkness, hospital rooms, garbage dumps, and lostness, then the works after 2004 began to reveal another kind of force—not cheap brightness, but hope seen from within despair.
In the Alas! The Sea series, that transformation appears most clearly in the image of a redemptive hand. Under a blood-red sunset, above a storming deep-blue sea, a great hand reaches down toward a nearly invisible figure in the waves. Without a single word, the painting gives form to the “from above” relationship Zhu had searched for over many years: rescue made present.
The Shepherd carries an even more personal meaning. It is not simply a declaration of vocation. It is the condensation of a long spiritual journey. The young man who once painted The Lost Lamb later stood in a church preaching, accompanying others, praying for them, and placing the image of the sheep back at the center of his art.
“From the lost lamb to the shepherd,” he has said, “I went through twenty years.”
In Chinese, the difference between tending sheep and shepherding people is only a change of words. In life, the distance between them passed through fear of death, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the formation of a community, and years of pastoral service.
Zhu says that only when a person’s worldview is rebuilt can one begin to think differently about society—that is, about the relationship between the small self and the larger whole. This conviction shaped the third stage of his art.
Standing in the Middle
After 2010, Zhu’s work turned more visibly toward public concern. He describes this stage as a rebuilding of values and a sociological turn in his art.
In his view, the artist is not merely someone who expresses private emotion. The artist may also return, in a sense, to a priestly position—standing between God and human beings, and between one person and another.
This does not mean art can replace faith. Nor does it mean the artist becomes a prophet in any self-appointed sense. Zhu is careful to say that art is first an expression of the journey of personal life and existence, a way of seeking God and love. It cannot be elevated into faith itself. Yet true individual feeling is never isolated. One must enter the community deeply enough to feel its pain, and yet also step back from the crowd, refusing to be swallowed by sin and hatred, in order to critique, cry out, and call people toward something beyond themselves.
For this reason, after 2010, Zhu’s work moved more directly into public realities: forgiveness and reconciliation, law and faith, the voices of marginalized people, and suffering in public memory. Some of these works took the form of installations; others entered public space through performance. Yet whatever the form, his aim was not to provoke for its own sake. He wanted to ask, in places of brokenness: Can human beings still hear the call of love?
This is why his art is not simply protest art. It is public, critical, and at times performative, but underneath, it remains pastoral. Zhu does not stand at a distance commenting on suffering. He tries to enter pain without allowing pain to become the final word.
He often speaks of the biblical call to “weep with those who weep.” For him, this is not a gentle slogan. It is a costly posture. One must enter the community in order to feel its wounds. But one must also remain connected to God, so as not to be consumed by the community’s sin, fear, and hatred.
“This truly requires a supernatural perseverance,” he says. “And that perseverance can only be sustained through a supernatural connection.”
Another Kind of Testing in a Free Society
Eventually, Zhu and his family came to North America.
The move was not something he had long planned. When he traveled in the United States in 2019, he still believed the subject and soil of his art were in China. Looking at his past work, he felt those images could only have been forced out of him in that particular environment. He asked himself, “Why would I come to America?”
Yet over time, through prayer, family needs, and a series of unexpected openings and closings, Zhu began to discern a new path. North America was not simply a place of arrival; it became another wilderness in which he would have to learn again how to see, speak, create, and shepherd.
Beginning again was not romantic. For an artist whose native language is visual, to be placed in a new environment is not simply to move from one place to another. It is to learn again how to see, how to speak, and how to enter a community. Zhu is honest that English remains a major barrier. Language limits his ability to enter direct conversation with mainstream American society and presents new challenges for his art and public engagement.
Yet what has most deeply occupied him is not only American society, but the Chinese church in North America.
In Beijing, his pastoral ministry unfolded under external pressure, limited space, and the tension between faith, art, and public life. In a free society, he has found that the church’s crises do not disappear. They change form.
“Having freedom does not mean there is no persecution,” he says.
He does not say this to romanticize suffering or deny the value of freedom. Rather, it is a pastoral warning from someone who has come from a different context. Where there is no obvious external pressure, people can still be trapped by comfort. Within religious freedom, churches can still be shaped by consumerism, a desire for stability, religious habit, and attachment to a comfortable life.
Zhu does not deny that many Chinese churches in North America are served by faithful believers. On the contrary, he has also been received, supported, and taught by them. But he senses that the temptations of a free society are more subtle. Faith can be diluted by comfort. A church can quietly become a place that maintains religious life rather than a community of people who understand themselves as sent.
This observation matters for readers both inside and outside China. Many narratives about the Chinese church place persecution and freedom on a simple spectrum: there it is difficult—here it is safe. There the church is pressured; here the church is free. But Zhu’s life reminds us that spiritual danger exists not only under restriction, but also within comfort. The wilderness tests us. So does the promised land.
When Zhu speaks about suffering, he does so with both sharpness and humility. Suffering, he says, is part of faith. Yet he does not present himself as one who is already prepared for martyrdom. Speaking of those who are currently bearing heavy burdens, he admits that if he were in their place, he does not know whether he would be able to stand.
This is not the voice of a self-appointed prophet. It is the voice of a man who once tended sheep and still knows that he, too, remains a sheep who must be sought and found.
Sheep on the Wave
Toward the end of our conversation, Zhu spoke of his hope for the future of Chinese churches and Chinese-language theology.
He believes the encounter between Christian faith and the Chinese-speaking world remains at an important moment. This encounter is not merely one-way transmission, nor is it a simple matter of cultural translation. It is forming new questions, new theological language, and perhaps new gifts for the global church.
This is where Zhu’s story intersects with ChinaSource readers. Zhu is not only an interesting figure in the art world, nor only a pastor from one particular church context. His life brings together several pressing questions: How has Chinese modernization shaped the soul of a person? How does Christian faith move from cultural resource to living commitment? How can art bear suffering, forgiveness, and public reality? And after entering a free society, what new spiritual tests does the church face?
Seen this way, his story is not a straight movement from darkness into light. It is a repeated experience of being called, sought, brought back, and then sent to seek others.
A voice. A search. A rope lowering someone into the depths and drawing him back into the light.
The boy once lowered down a cliff by his brother to retrieve a lost lamb has now become a shepherd. But he knows better than anyone that the other end of the rope has never been in his own hands.
